Tuesday, 14 July 2015

Going beyond the norm

I’ve been a bit itinerant this year. The response to Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia, the report I edited for the British Psychological Society, has
been amazing and I’ve been invited to speak about it in Washington, New
York, Seville, Dublin and most recently Milan. So it was great to get an
invitation to do something nearer home last month, in our local town of Tunbridge
Wells. I was part of a panel at the
annual Critical Voices event.
Critical Voices? To tell the truth I wasn’t totally clear about it either. It describes
itself like this:

‘The space of
medicine, health and wellbeing is one we all inhabit. It is at once complex,
often highly technical and grounded in power, politics and debate. It is a
space where we have made life changing advances. Yet it is also where we are at
our most vulnerable, where our most intimate times of birth, illness,
treatment, life and death are played out. Critical in every sense. Critical Voices provides an opportunity for
conversations that explore the voices in this space as we strive to bring
together doctors, surgeons, psychologists, patients, carers, campaigners,
researchers and academics - intertwined with the expressive insights from film,
music, poetry and literature.’

As you might expect, it was a mighty interesting day. I did a ten minute double-act with my friend
and colleague Peter
Kinderman, talking about our vision for the future of psychological health
care when we stop dividing people into ‘normal’ and ‘mentally ill’. A video of the event is embeded below or you can watch it on Youtube here.

About the Salomons Centre

The Salomons Centre for Applied Psychology in Tunbridge Wells, England. We are part of the Canterbury Christ church University Department of Psychology, Politics and Sociology. We run training courses in Clinical Psychology and CBT and also practice improvement programmes for child and adolescent mental health services. On this site staff and trainees in the Department write about a wide range of issues related to applied psychology, psychological therapies, policy and health service development.